Realistic Star Citizen Update – May 27th, 2018

Calling All Devs
-At some point in the future you will no longer be teleported to the proper location for animations to start so you’ll instead maneuver to the start point and then start the animation. So basically more delays and obligatory animations between basic gameplay functions.
-Dying too many times will cause your character to perma-die (old info being restated). You’ll have to create a new character a this point. This has zero gameplay effects but we should expect CIG to blow about a year designing all the scarring and ageing tech needed for it.
-Ships with VTOL thrusters need to keep them aligned properly to the planet, otherwise they’ll crash and ‘splode.

Star Citizen: The Power of Intel® Optane™
-A half hour of CIG talking about how great Intel®’s new Optane™ drives are.
-The video is only really promoting them to developers since it’s footage from the Games Developers Conference.
-Still CIG is on stage promoting Intel product using biased stats (Optane NVMe vs SATA SSD) and selling an overpriced product that a NVMe SSD can essentially match for a much cheaper price.
-Just so everyone is clear, even an NVMe high speed SSD or Optane drive won’t really help with Star Citizen currently. CIG just sold those to people for Intel bux.

Around the Verse
-CIG is working on FPS visor tech so you can have a plastic visor rammed in front of your face to produce glare, streaking, and all sorts of other issues. Because “realism”. This is one of the dumber things I’ve seen in an FPS.Second place in stupid is CIG’s own shitty stamina system.

-CIG is working on getting ships power distribution working along with scanning.
-Huge section about re-doing older armor sets, could have sworn I’ve seen CIG talk about this for years now. Armors look good though.
-There’s a lore section but really a lot of this episode just feels like filler.

Reverse the Verse
-More about the legacy armor, because listening to CIG fill time is so fun.
-No custom colors, chose from 21 pre-made color variants.
-You can mix and match armor/color sections.
-Lots of “maybe” answers all over.

Production Schedule
-3.2- Due about a month from now.
–Service Beacon Improvements and Escort Missions have been delayed until 3.3.
-Network Bind Culling is sitting stuck at 45% and hasn’t really moved much in a while.
-Planetary Mining is sitting at 55% and has seen slow progress.
-Quantum Linking (group warp) is sitting at 29% and hasn’t really moved much.
-FPS AI, Shopping Kiosks, Economy Polish, and some of the Group Mechanics are all over 75% and moving ahead steadily.
-Nearly all ships are sitting at under 50% ready with very little progress.
-Redesigned FPS armors are all basically done at 90% or moving forward enough to be done in a month.

-3.3-
-Service Beacon Improvements and Escort Missions now delayed into 3.3.
-Little progress to report otherwise this week. Some stuff is already at near 80% done but not moving.
-Some network tech is being reported at near 80% done and other sections are not even started seemingly.
–There are now so many large scale features crammed into the later half of the year that unless CIG produces gameplay like the never have before there are going to have to be major cuts and/or delays.

TL;DR
More feature delays, questionable design decisions and priorities, and CIG piling delayed content into another Jesus Patch that’ll save the games development from irrelevance. Welcome to Star Citizen.

Realistically features are going to get delayed from 3.3 so at this point it looks like the 3.X experience presented in 2016 will be hitting the original 3.1 targets towards the later half of 2018, unless CIG somehow radically increases their output many of the 3.2 targets are probably out to 2019 now, and if the current progress to date is a demonstration of CIG’s capabilities then the original vision for 3.X to 4.0 region will probably still be coming together in 2020 or even 2021.

I seriously hope CIG is working furiously on Squadron 42 or something else major because otherwise the current development pace and project management would be some of the worst I’ve seen.